Adventure Gamebooks banner
The Adventure Gamebooks banner is an informal term applied to the Puffin Books book cover design for their "Adventure Gamebooks" range, the flagship being the Fighting Fantasy Main Series of books. It also introduced what would become the very familiar and almost Fighting Fantasy Logo to the front of the books. ''Fighting Fantasy'' Main Series For the main series of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks this was the second main design (arguably the third if the wraparound cover of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain first edition is counted as its own format type), replacing that of the previous Coloured Number Format. It was introduced in 1984 with book eight Scorpion Swamp, and featured a green "zig-zag" stripe across the top of the cover, containing the words Adventure Gamebooks in white type and the number of the book (preceded by the word "Gamebook") also in white. The number was preceded by the Fighting Fantasy Logo, introduced with this series, which was green with white writing. There were two exceptions to this, and they were Seas of Blood and Robot Commando, where the writing in the stripe was black, as was the number. The Fighting Fantasy logo was also printed on the cover and the spine and rear cover of each book were uniformly coloured a light green. Steve Jackson has said of the green spine and logo: The older books (numbers one through seven) were reprinted using the new cover format. It was during this period that The Citadel of Chaos was given a new cover by Ian Miller to replace the older one by Emmanuel.Fighting Fantasy FAQ on the Internet Archive record of Fightingfantasy.com This design was used up to the 24th book in the series (Creature of Havoc) after which, from 1987, the Dragon Cover Format was used. ''Sorcery! When it was decided that Puffin Books should take over the publishing from Penguin Books (Puffin being the children's imprint of Penguin), the format of the ''Sorcery! books also changed and this was to the "zig-zag" stripe style, although they retained their larger size compared to the main series. In this case the stripe was a dark orange, almost red. In other respects the style was similar to the main series, except that preceding the number were the words "The Sorcery Epic" and the Fighting Fantasy Logo, was the dark orange/red colour with white writing. Like the main series, the Dragon Cover Format took over in 1987 and Sorcery! was reprinted in that fashion. Other Books Introductory Role-Playing *''Fighting Fantasy - The Introductory Role-playing Game'' - This book never had an "Adventure Gamebooks" banner style makeover, having been published prior to it and not republished during the "Adventure Gamebooks" banner timespan. *''The Riddling Reaver'' - When this book was first published it was done so under the "Adventure Gamebooks" banner format, although there was no number. Non-''Fighting Fantasy'' Books Puffin Books also published a number of other Adventure Gamebooks employing this format: *''Maelstrom'' by Alexander Scott - this had a blue stripe with "Adventure Gamebooks" written in white, but no number as this was a one-off gamebook with no plans for further adventures. *''Starlight Adventures'' - these had a light blue stripe, outlined with red, with "Adventure Gamebooks" written in white and the number of the book in the series at the far right. The number was preceded by the Starlight Adventures Logo. *''Cretan Chronicles'' - these had a light orange stripe, outlined with blue, with "Adventure Gamebooks" written in black and the number of the book in the series at the far right preceded by the word "Gamebook". The number was preceded by the Cretan Chronicles Logo. See Also References Category:Book Formats